In 2025, together with his director of corporate communications, Nicholas Zamiska, he published The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Weak Faith, and the Future of the West. Its key thesis: Silicon Valley must \u201crepay a moral debt to the state\u201d and take part in the nation\u2019s defence. We examine how Karp built infrastructure for modern war and what ideology he advances.<\/p>\n
Missing the wood for the trees<\/h2>\n
The main problem Palantir addresses is structural. In America\u2019s intelligence services a \u201cjars of marbles\u201d model evolved: the FBI<\/span>, CIA<\/span>, NSA<\/span> and the police had their own databases, and sharing moved through bureaucratic requests. Each agency kept its data in a separate \u201cvessel\u201d\u2014even knowing that a neighbouring agency might hold crucial information, agents could not get to it quickly.<\/p>\n This fragmentation cost lives. One of the best-known examples is the story of John O\u2019Neill<\/a>, the FBI\u2019s leading counterterrorism specialist. By the mid-1990s he saw cells of international radical networks, including al-Qaeda, as the chief threat to US security. He warned that terrorists had infrastructure inside the country and pressed for closer inter-agency co-ordination.<\/p>\n Different fragments of information remained split across structures. The FBI logged suspicious domestic episodes\u2014for instance, would-be terrorists\u2019 interest in flight schools. The CIA, for its part, had data on a meeting of al-Qaeda-linked individuals in Malaysia and knew that two participants\u2014Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar\u2014had entered the United States on visas. But information-sharing between agencies was incomplete and conflict-ridden: FBI staff seconded to the CIA later claimed their attempts to pass the details to O\u2019Neill were blocked inside the agency. Isolated facts never coalesced into a single picture.<\/p>\n In the summer of 2001 O\u2019Neill left the FBI amid internal conflicts and scandals over leaks and misconduct. In August he became head of security at the World Trade Center. On September 11th 2001 O\u2019Neill died while evacuating people from the South Tower.<\/p>\n Palantir built a system that unifies disparate databases into a single model of relationships. The company calls it<\/a> an ontology\u2014a structure where objects, events and people are linked by explicit relations. An address connects to an owner, a transaction to accounts, a call to subscribers and geolocation. Such a model lets analysts quickly spot patterns that once took weeks of manual work.<\/p>\n In 2005 Palantir\u2019s first institutional backer was In-Q-Tel<\/a>, a venture fund set up by the CIA in 1999 to finance dual-use technologies. It put in about $2m and for several years remained the company\u2019s only outside investor.<\/p>\n In 2011 Bloomberg reported<\/a> that Palantir\u2019s technology had become a key tool for US intelligence in the \u201cwar on terror\u201d and was used to analyse data in counterterrorism operations.<\/p>\n For its first years Palantir Technologies was almost absent from public view. It seldom spoke to the press, shunned publicity and built its business largely around contracts with US government bodies.<\/p>\n Palantir engineers worked directly at customers\u2019 sites\u2014in intelligence, the military and law enforcement. In tech and defence the firm was well known, but to the wider public it remained invisible. Even in Silicon Valley many could not quite grasp<\/a> what Palantir actually did: a \u201cGoogle for spies\u201d, or just a very expensive database.<\/p>\n Palantir develops three core products:<\/p>\n Daniel Trusilo\u2014formerly a US Army officer who served in Iraq, later an AI-ethics researcher at the University of St Gallen\u2014notes<\/a> a crucial feature of Palantir: the same technological base is used for dual purposes. In his words, \u201cthe same software that optimises supply chains now runs military operations.\u201d<\/p>\n For years Palantir lost money. After listing on the New York Stock Exchange in 2020 its shares went nowhere. Analysts struggled to see how the firm could make money in the civilian sector\u2014too niche a product.<\/p>\n That changed with large language models (LLMs). When ChatGPT arrived in late 2022, Palantir argued that its long bet on ontologies and a semantic data layer had suddenly become valuable.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were pleasantly surprised to discover how closely the world we had been building lined up with the era of large language models. It became clear: you cannot realise the potential of LLMs without such structures,\u201d<\/em> said<\/em><\/a> the company\u2019s CTO, Shyam Sankar.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n In another interview he also said<\/a> that \u201cin many ways all the work on Foundry and Gotham seemed to be waiting for the arrival of large language models.\u201d<\/p>\n Palantir\u2019s logic is that LLMs are unreliable on their own without structured context. A language model needs a layer that connects a text interface to the objects, events and real processes inside an organisation. That is the role the company assigns to ontologies\u2014a system of relations among people, transactions, devices, documents and actions.<\/p>\n Palantir rewrote its roadmap, embedded LLMs into its products and launched AIP. From that moment the shares began to climb.<\/p>\n In 2023 PLTR rose 167%, in 2024\u2014340%. In the first half of 2025 Palantir became<\/a> the top performer in the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100.<\/p>\n In 2025 Karp and Palantir\u2019s communications chief, Nicholas Zamiska, published The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Weak Faith, and the Future of the West.<\/p>\n In spring 2026 the company posted a condensed version on X in 22 theses. The thread spread across social media and sparked debate far beyond tech: some saw an attempt to justify a tighter alliance among technology companies, the state and the military; others, a near-complete political programme of techno-nationalism.<\/p>\nGotham, Foundry and AIP<\/h2>\n
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The ChatGPT moment<\/h2>\n
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The Technological Republic<\/h2>\n